Sneetches Chapter Summaries

Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The only thing that is constant is change.” Throughout the span of our lives, we constantly see change occurring within our surroundings. As human beings, we tend to reject the idea of change; we disfavor the idea of someone or something coming into our lives and disrupting our way of living. Because of this, we create boundaries that separate ourselves from those that we deem as “different,” whether that difference is because of values and beliefs or because of a physical difference. This process of thinking often leads to situations wherein we create a type of “us versus them” ordeal, where one group of people sees themselves as significantly better or superior to the other. The idea of creating

In lecture, Professor Hickman used the example of Dr. Seuss’ book, The Sneetches, as a simplistic way to describe the creation of boundaries within a society and how these boundaries subsequently lead to changes within a culture. The story begins by telling of a land populated by Sneetches, but in the eyes of the Sneetches, not all are equal. There are some Sneetches who have stars on their bellies and some with plain bellies, those who had stars that they were better than those who without the stars and the star-bellied Sneetches made sure to never let them join them in any sort of activities, thus creating a boundary between them. Then one day a man comes to visit them and he has a machine that will put stars on the bellies of those who have none and as soon as the “original” star-bellied Sneetches see this they become upset, but the man with the machine says that stars are no longer in style and that he has a machine that can remove their stars and they all agree to go

There have been many cases of discrimination against people of African American decent, this type of segregation is mainly linked to the color of skin a person has. In the past, blacks were seen as the inferior race and because of that they were treated with disrespect and deprived of certain rights and freedom that were open to whites. Today the movement “black lives matter” is gaining a lot of attention in the media with how people with darker skin color are being treated poorly. It all started after an eighteen-year-old boy was killed at the hands of a white police officer, since then people have been rallying against racial discrimination. The movement has created a distinction between “all lives matter” and “black lives matter,” and while some people see it as bringing about awareness to how black are treated as less equal in situations others see it as saying that black lives matter more than other people’s lives. Overall, both these ideologies are creating a separation of culture where an individual might alter their behavior per how they, within their own cultural reality, perceive the situation and how their views coincide with the opposing groups. We have seen this movement bring about violence in situations where, before this movement, people would have behaved less erotically. Different boundaries within our culture are brought about in a variety of ways; another situation in which